The young girl discovered in January, allegedly with a group of monkeys in a north Indian forest, is the most recent feral child story to hit the news.
Photograph: KK Productions/AP

In 2011, I made a TV documentary series for Discovery, researching the truth behind stories of feral children. Are they ever true? How might a child be affected by growing up in a jungle, or chicken coop, or with dogs? We found witnesses and scraps of evidence to support or debunk the stories that had grown around these strange girls and boys. We explored human developmental psychology, the anthropological ideas that could explain a family or community’s reaction to a particular child, and the traits of ‘host’ species that might determine whether survival (and acceptance) was at least possible.

The tales were murky, fantastical and frequently harrowing. Vulnerable children in dangerous places, inevitably carrying the scars of their experiences. The extraordinary thing was not that they were supposedly protected by monkeys, or that they could run on all fours, it was that they’d survived at all.

When the story of the young girl found in the jungles of northern India acting like a monkey went viral recently, I wasn’t surprised. I was even less surprised that, just days later, the stories were amended – actually, the girl doesn’t appear to have been with monkeys for a long time. In fact, she appears to have been abandoned quite recently. She appears to have learning disabilities. A real case of a feral child. That is, a vulnerable, abandoned survivor.

When you start to assess multiple feral child cases, you’re struck by certain recurring tropes. Some point to how a child ended up in such a drastically inhumane situation – namely family breakdown, violence, alcoholism or drug addiction, political or social unrest in the country. Some features demonstrate the myriad ways the human body can adapt – hardening skin, coarsening hair and motor skills honed to survive environmental exposure and a lack of safe places. But other features tell us more about ourselves, and society, than they ever will about the so-called feral child.

We’re fascinated by creatures that crawl the line somewhere between human and animal, between natural/unnatural, between civilised/wild. By defining the feral, we define the normal. That’s why these stories capture our imaginations. The next time a feral child case hits the news, see how many of these features are mentioned. It’s like tragic-story bingo.

Wild vervet monkeys (
Chlorocebus pygerythrus) are native to Uganda and are said to have ‘raised’ a feral child known as John Ssebunya. Photograph: Mary-Ann Ochota

Trope 1: The feral child makes the sounds of an animal

It’s no surprise that we want to make sense of a squawking, gibbering, chirruping child, and attribute some kind of animal language to their vocalisations – it’s a means of making sense of the unsettling creature we’re dealing with.

Children will mimic those around them, and seek company and comfort from whatever source available – so if the most communicative creature in your life is a dog, it’s possible you’ll pick up the habit of making barking noises. That’s not to say that you think that you are a dog. Or that you’re ‘speaking’ dog. Animals do, of course, communicate verbally, sometimes in sophisticated and complicated systems. But the noises we interpret as being the meaningful clucking of a chicken-boy, or the howling of a wolf-girl, are in reality the disordered or pre-verbal vocalisations of a profoundly damaged child.

Trope 2: The feral child is covered in hair

There is a relatively rare medical condition called hypertrichosis, which literally means ‘overly hairy’. There are a number of causes, some of them hormonal.

The evidence is sparse, but it’s possible that children living on minimal food and inadequate or inappropriate diet, could develop ‘fur’ because of hormone imbalance or dietary deficiency. But we don’t see children in famine-struck and war-torn areas with hairy faces, despite starvation and ill health. It’s also been suggested that under extreme environmental conditions, human skin would develop a protective layer. But this is most likely to manifest as hard, thickened skin. Existing hair might get thicker and coarser, but it’s unlikely that hair would start sprouting out of skin that was previously mostly hairless. So why are many feral children described as being covered in hair?

In many cultures hair is a signifier of power, control and morality. Some haircuts are socially appropriate. Others indicate a breaking or flouting of the rules. It’s no accident of language that we talk about ‘taming’ our hair, or of scruffy hair looking ‘mad’ or ‘wild’. Controlled hair equals a civilised or controlled self. The feral child’s hair - unwashed, uncut, tangled - is natural, but also disturbing. It exposes the animal side of every human. A neglected child may well look hairy. Add fear, and a storyteller’s eye for freakshow detail, and you end up with fur.

Trope 3: They have claw-like nails, sharp teeth and staring eyes

Children who’ve grown up without normal socialisation won’t learn the social etiquette of eye contact, and so appear to stare ‘like animals’. It might seem scary or be an indicator of innocent ‘naturalness’. Either way, people will notice that it’s ‘odd’. Long finger- and toenails aren’t a surprising thing if you’ve had no-one to cut them – but in the context of a feral child story, they become claws – dangerously animal-like.

Trope 4: The feral child can’t eat cooked food

Most feral child stories relate some episode where the child refuses cooked food, and if they try it makes them sick. Raw becomes opposed to civilised: cooking is what makes us human. In reality, a distressed child in an unfamiliar situation (in a hospital, a village, a press conference) will likely refuse all food – in that respect we’re exactly the same as other animals.

The dangerous consequences of Othering

Charles Linnaeuspublished the Systema Naturae in 1735, the basis of the system we still use today to describe all the species in the world. Linnaeus considered that different kinds of people were actually different species: We were all mammals, we were all primates, we were all of the genus Homo (Latin for ‘man’). But there were six species of man, and they were not equal – Homo americanus, Homo europaeus, Homo asiaticus, Homo afer (American, European, Asian, African); then Homo monstrosus (monstrous, including giants and dwarves) and Homo ferens – Wild Men. Homo ferens’ characteristics were “mutus, tetrapus and hirsutus” – mute, moving on all-fours, and hairy. These wild people were biologically different from Enlightenment Europeans; distant cousins, but nothing closer.

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Across all cultures there are tales of semi-humans living beyond the reach of safety and society. The Yeren in central China, the Yeti, Bigfoot, ogres, giants, fairies, green men, sirens and man-monsters. Then there are the half-man half-animals – the centaur, the mermaid, people with wings, tails, hooves and horns who inhabit our world but don’t necessarily play to our rules.

And there are the myriad but strikingly similar ways of explaining disorder, dysfunction and disability in children – either a healthy child has been cursed or possessed in some way, or the child itself has been swapped for a wicked and dangerous Changeling. From the Philippines to Ireland to Nigeria, changeling stories make sense of infant abnormality and death. Either way, the child’s difference is because they are not quite properly, fully, human any more.

And the bottom line is that the ways we categorise an individual has very real impacts on how we treat them.

Humans are naturally social. In order to grow up normal, we need other people to care for us, to communicate with us, to keep us safe. Across cultures and through history the way these needs are met has varied, but the fundamental needs remain. A child surviving without interaction, language or love is a child that will be damaged by an unnatural life. Humans are not designed to live like that. It’s of course possible some of these children ended up in the strange ‘wild’ situation because they were showing some level of abnormality or developmental delay in the first place. It’s a difficult idea, but raising dysfunctional or disabled children is, to some extent, a modern luxury. In communities where life is hard and resources are scarce the accepted practice may well have been to abandon babies or children with abnormalities, allowing them to die. Older children may have been confined or restrained, but if they escaped no-one would go looking for them.

We’ll never know whether some of these kids have congenital difficulties which led them to be selected for unusual treatment, or which contributed to their abandonment. Or whether they started off ‘normal’ and it was their experiences that have left them in this state.

We’ll remain captivated by feral child stories – the monster within, the noble savage, the fascinating freak at the edge of humanity. But when we read those feral stories and fail to see the harm as well as the hair and howling, we become the monsters.